Now Cliff Johnson has a cold.
“I haven’t worked in a week,” the sniffling 55-year-old confesses over
the phone from his home in Bristol, Connecticut. You can almost hear
gamers groan in unison. Johnson is the cult hero of Macintosh puzzle gaming,
and his feverish fans need him at his keyboard. For the past six years,
he’s been slaving away at coding a new title, The Fool and His Money.
He has no publisher or financial backer; his funding comes from friends
and what he calls “True Believers” — scores of players willing to
preorder a $40 game that’s been “almost finished” since 2005.

What
could possibly inspire such loyalty and trust (especially given the
cautionary title of the project)? Enduring adoration for the maestro’s
mind-bending creation, The Fool’s Errand, no doubt.

Johnson got into game design while monkeying around on a Mac 512K in
the mid-1980s. “It’s an ideal medium to stage an illustrated storybook
of puzzles,” he says. He constructed a series of simple tableaus about
a character called the Fool. To help the Fool on his quest, players had
to crack scores of devious brainteasers, culminating in a meta-puzzle
that linked them all. “You had to earn the story,” Johnson says.

When The Fool’s Errand appeared on platforms like
Amiga, MS-DOS, and Mac Plus, it caused a sensation, selling around
250,000 copies — and, he says with a chuckle, “ten times as many hint
books” (software piracy goes way back). Johnson went on to make other
games, consulted for Disney and Mattel, and designed a $100,000 treasure hunt that was embedded in a book by magician David Blaine. But creating a
follow-up to his seminal 1987 hit has become his raison d’Ítre.

Game technology has changed a lot since the Reagan era, but apart
from the addition of color, Johnson’s sequel looks strikingly similar
to his maiden effort. “It won’t appeal to everyone, but I’m confident
that the people who have kept my games alive for the past two decades
will be thrilled. There are memory challenges, word jumbles, letter
ciphers, sentence constructions, and patchwork pictures. I want players
to enjoy the ‘aha!’ of solving a puzzle. I want them to succeed.”

And fans want him to succeed. He insists that The Fool and His Money will be done this summer — for real this time. Then he can get started on the capstone of his projected trilogy, The Fool’s Paradise.